Polyhedra, complexes, nets and symmetry

Skeletal polyhedra and polygonal complexes in ordinary Euclidean 3-space are finite or infinite 3-periodic structures with interesting geometric, combinatorial and algebraic properties. They can be viewed as finite or infinite 3-periodic graphs (nets) equipped with additional structure imposed by the faces, allowed to be skew, zigzag or helical. A polyhedron or complex is regular if its geometric symmetry group is transitive on the flags (incident vertex–edge–face triples). There are 48 regular polyhedra (18 finite polyhedra and 30 infinite apeirohedra), as well as 25 regular polygonal complexes, all infinite, which are not polyhedra. Their edge graphs are nets well known to crystallographers and they are identified explicitly. There are also six infinite families of chiral apeirohedra, which have two orbits on the flags such that adjacent flags lie in different orbits.